Review

Review Date: 13-August-06
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Junk

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Good heavens, how I hated "Little Miss Sunshine." This lesson in twee, self-conscious cinema is exactly the kind of crud that makes "art house" and "independent" sound like four-letter words to people wary of pretension. It starts out boring, graduates to aggravating, and ends at honest-to-god nauseating. I almost hurled in the theater.

The only unhorrendous thing about "Little Miss Sunshine" is its cast, all of whom ought to be ashamed of themselves. The guilty ensemble includes Greg Kinnear as a suburban loser trying to be a winner, Toni Collette as his frustrated wife, Alan Arkin as his drug-addled hippie father, Paul Dano as his mute teenage son, and Steve Carell as his suicidal brother-in-law, who happens to be America's foremost Proust scholar. In other words, the players in this dramedy are inflated representatives of the lost souls that comprise Real Life (or so screenwriter Michael Arndt wants you to think), and not one of them is someone you'd actually want to breathe air. The only tolerable character is the family's seven-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin), whose native innocence is supposed to counterbalance everyone else's adult confusion. She is cute, all right, but that becomes a liability in the final act when the story becomes so gross you don't want it to coexist in the same world with children.

The grade-C line-up ("C" for contrived, corny) pretty much requires that the plot be driven by a road trip, a device which has been abused of late (see "Elizabethtown," or rather, don't) and may be due for a sabbatical. After deciding to take the girl 600 miles to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest, the movie's pack of morons can’t hop a plane or pile into a station wagon or anything remotely normal. Instead, they embark on their momentous westward journey in a beat-up VW bus that needs everyone pushing to get to second gear and blasts the horn on its own volition. (Go ahead, roar with laughter at the quirkiness.) On the road they suffer pit stop abandonment, the loss of dreams, and a run-in with a cop lifted directly from "9 to 5" (sacrilege!). Every second is stilted.

But the drab and derivative bulk of the picture doesn't prepare a body for the denouement. It's icky enough watching such unsavory characters learn Lessons and come together as a Family, so do they have to do it at a kiddie porn convention? I've never given any thought to child pageants other than a quick "Eeww" at that murder victim in the tabloids a few years back, but "Little Miss Sunshine" rubbed my nose in it. I'm not exaggerating (for once) when I say I felt physically ill watching the end of the movie. Sure, the point of the story is that these plastic, sexed-up kids are indicative of a societal illness, but the whole subject has no comedic potential whatsoever. And the characters' triumph over the shabbiness of this definition of "success" is lame to the nth degree. Embarrassing. Not funny. Devoid of entertainment value. Did I mention that I hated this movie? Let me add that I'm flabbergasted it was a hit at Sundance this year. "Little Miss Sunshine" is a mockery of good storytelling and a travesty of a film.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.